A step-by-step guide to developing and enriching your Bill of Materials (BoMs)
Accurate and reliable equipment and maintenance Bill of Materials (BoMs) are crucial for assuring the correct equipment, with the correct specifications are procured in a timely and cost effective manner. A highly functional BoM will include a comprehensive list of materials, components and instructions required to build, replace or maintain a piece of equipment.
When BoM data is incomplete, outdated or incorrect, this can incur costly issues that could very easily be avoided. Focusing on enriching and verifying your BoM data is proven to unlock significant efficiency gains across the entire operations of a plant, and should be one of the first steps that plant operators should consider when looking for opportunities to improve performance.
We recently caught up with Iain Wood, ABL’s Materials Manager, who has shared key insights from the world of BoM development and enrichment. In this blog, Iain shares advice on how to recognise indicators that could signify the need to improve your BoMs, the benefits of doing this, and a proven, step-by-step process to follow for developing and enriching your BoM data for optimal return on investment (ROI).
What are the common signs and symptoms that could signify the need to improve your BoM data?
- “Holding obsolete stock – Holding parts for equipment that is no longer required could result in having significant capital tied up unnecessarily. A big cause of this is equipment becoming obsolete, and BoMs not being updated to reflect this condition change. When this happens, the part is believed to be still required and will tie up valuable space and resources to store and preserve it in the warehouse.
- “Inflated procurement costs – On the other end of the spectrum, if equipment has never been identified as part of a BoM, but is actually required, this can result in direct purchasing from manufacturers at the last minute, as they are not readily available in the inventory. It is common for last minute orders to be required at short notice, and this is often reflected in the cost. Expediting orders in this way is extremely inefficient, costly, and can also cause delays in maintenance and extended periods of outage.
- “Holding excess stock – Equipment manufacturers, vendors or EPC contractors tend to often recommend as many spares as possible be included in a BoM, as they will make profit from this. To avoid being left with surplus stock and tying cash up unnecessarily, these recommendations should go through a 3rd party review and verification process whereby the SPIRs/SPILs are reviewed by both the plants materials and maintenance specialists, to determine what is actually required for your specific plant.
What are the benefits of developing and enriching BoMs?
“Well maintained BoMs should provide a source of truth for multiple teams across the business, and provide a reliable list of spares required to effectively maintain and operate equipment throughout its lifecycle. They are ultimately the foundation for smooth, efficient operations, with significant benefits felt across inventory, maintenance and procurement teams.
Inventory and procurement-related benefits:
- Assuring the correct spare is ordered
- Minimising the need for direct purchasing and last minute orders, which saves costs
- Reduction of excess inventory
- Potential to sell spares that are not required, and get money back or credit notes for vendors
- Reducing rental costs and warehouse footprint, if less spares are required
- The ability to easily determine if non-moving stock is required for an active asset
- The ability to identify similar items or equipment where individual materials can be standardised or substituted
Maintenance-related benefits:
- Faster and accurate execution of both planned and unplanned work
- Less preservation maintenance required, as there is less stock
- Minimised risk of shutdowns
- Ability to plan maintenance effectively, assuring the right spare is available for maintenance
- Avoid delays in maintenance, causing unhealthy maintenance backlog
The step-by-step process to developing and enriching BoMs:
“A BoM development and enrichment project is a timely and resource heavy initiative to run internally. For plant operators who want to unlock the benefits associated with accurate and reliable BoM data, but don’t have the resources internally to do this, outsourcing this work to a team of specialists is a highly efficient option.
“In addition to shifting the burden of the work to an external specialist, this tactic can also bring additional benefits relating to cost, turnaround time and quality.
“At ABL, our clients benefit from gaining access to:
- BoM building and enrichment software and BoM data libraries that can reduce the project timeline, costs and assure quality and consistency of the data delivered
- Materials and maintenance specialists, working side-by-side to assure materials expertise and practical engineering and equipment knowledge is embedded into the BoM creation
- Commercial models that assure ROI
“From our experience of delivering hundreds of thousands of BoMs, we have developed highly effective, efficient and collaborative processes to deliver these 5 key stages:
- Validation and prioritisation:
The first step is to validate your equipment and identify the BoMs required for your plant, not every piece of equipment will need a BoM, and it is important to prioritise the optimisation or creation of these based on risk and how important that piece of equipment is to the plants safety and production.
For companies who have a limited budget available, i would always recommending prioritising production critical equipment first. It is also important to note that this exercise is only as good as the data you have available, and to do this effectively, you must have an accurate asset register, well populated nameplate data and accurate criticality rankings. and we would do this by using your tag register or document repository. - Build and enhance:
We would then have a clear list of BoMs required, and whether these need to be improved or created from scratch. During this stage, we would:
– Liaise directly with the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) through our established gateways to validate the data or identify obsolescence
– Identify the recommended spare parts
– Input or update the information through our tried and tested procedures
– Provide further recommendations to consider for enhancing your inventory management strategy - QA and approvals:
We then go through our established quality assurance process where our senior materials engineers will carry out 100% QA of all BoMs prior to delivery to client.
Once our internal QA has been done, the data will be available for client QA and approval. During this phase of the project, we will provide our clients with unique user logins to our BoM data build software, Effio™ to review the data or raise any queries or further requests until all BoMs are approved for use. - Standardisation:
Once the BoMs are approved, we would export the raw data and push this through a standardisation and cleansing process. This task will provide an enhanced level of information and detail to the BoMs, and ensures terminology is standardised across the business to set you up for future successes. - Export and load:
Once this process is complete, we would export the BoMs into CMMS load sheets using our Effio™ software. The load sheets would be issued to the client for upload into their live computerised maintenance management system (CMMS).
How we can help
To streamline and enhance the process of BoM development, we use our custom-built CMMS data build and update software Effio™. Capable of replicating our clients’ CMMS environment, this is a user-friendly, collaborative and accessible platform that is ideal for BoM development and enrichment projects. A few key benefits include:
- A live, collaborative system accessible by the full project team, both in ABL and within the client’s team
- All work is conducted in the cloud, including the QA and approval, eliminating the need for uncontrolled emails, messaging and data transfers
- This is highly effective in the current climate where travel is severely restricted. Even working remotely from the client and in different timezones, it still allows all the data to be accessed as a live system
- Every data change is logged, providing traceability to users and a full audit log, for maximum visibility and transparency on project progress
- Ability to add different statuses to each BoM, for ease of reporting and work prioritisation
- User friendly, receiving excellent feedback from our existing clients